Bono’s Hail to the King

The latest issue of Uncut Legends magazine is all about Elvis’s life and times. We all know Larry’s the biggest Elvis fan, but of course Bono provides the foreword. It’s a familiar piece for U2 fans — it previously appeared in Rolling Stone magazine (RS 946, April 15, 2004). In it, Bono speaks of the appeal of The King to a scrappy teenager from Dublin:

“Pretty much everything I want from guitar, bass and drums was present: a performer annoyed by the distance from his audience; a persona that made a prism of fame’s wide-angle lens; a sexuality matched only by a thirst for God’s instruction. But it’s that elastic spastic dance that is the most difficult to explain — hips that swivel from Europe to Africa, which is the whole point of America, I guess. For an Irish boy, the voice might have explained the sexiness of the U.S.A., but the dance explained the energy of this new world about to boil over and scald the rest of us with new ideas on race, religion, fashion, love and peace.”

Perhaps this piece provides a little hint to what Bono’s ‘Sinner’ act during the current Vertigo Tour’s performance of ‘Love and Peace or Else’ is about… the Elvis moves, the leather and the threat: We come in peace, shoot to kill.

Uncut Legends: Elvis, including re-prints of three extensive Elvis interviews from the period 1956-60 is on sale now at news agents and online from NME.com.